This was Day 2 of the joint MOSS / DARTS ALES June weekend at the DARTS field. Skye Malcolm stepped up to direct the event in much the same fashion as the previous MOSS event the day before. In his words: "Same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel". Pretty much the same cast of volunteers: Skye, Jay Watkins, Gil Perez, Mark.Groves and launch meister Al Schmidt. Thanks guys!

The weather forecast was for a bit more milder temps than Saturday with forecast highs in the upper 80's with a bit lighter yet brisk winds out of the North in the 10 mph range. Again, the forecast was accurate. It was the opinion of many flyers that the thermal conditions were actually a bit bit tougher in terms of finding lift than on Saturday. Also, by the time the last round rolled around, the winds became gusty causing issues with land-outs and again difficulty in hitting the landing tapes.

We had 16 pilots, just like on Saturday, with a few new faces replacing those who could not make it on Sunday. We flew in 3 groups and got in 6 rounds.

Round 1 began with a gigantic thermal parked over the field and relatively newbie JD Filkins scored a near perfect score of 7:56 with 40 landing points. He was one happy camper!

Don Harris had technical difficulties in round 2 and took a 0 when his motor didn't start. Despite this, Don ended up in 5th place at the end of the day by achieving nearly perfect round flight scores of 1000 in 4 rounds and a nearly perfect 979.08 in the other one. Good flying Don!

Jerry Shape dominated the sky by making time on all of his flights while scoring a minimum of 40 out of 50 landing flights on all flights. Jerry's scores were therefore that of (4) 1000 flight scores with 2 near misses of 997.91 and 989.54 where he missed the target time by 2 and 7 seconds respectively. Combine that with his near perfect landing scores, Jerry won every round he flew in. Good flying Jerry!

We again broke for lunch with grill master Mark Groves cooking up the hot dogs. Chips, cookies and water rounded out the lunch .Lunch time seems to be a good time for socializing and provided a good break from the round by round flying drill.

On a personal note, I nearly crashed my AVA when I went upwind too far (for sun glasses anyways) and lost sight of my model. Vocal calls from fellow flyers saved the day and I spotted it, of course not where I thought it was. Thanks guys for the help. My take-away lesson learned was: "Don't go to the edges of my eyesight, especially with sunglasses on with the sun at my back and behind a cloud.". The corollary to this for me is: "My eyesight is not that good, so keep the model in close." But all ended well and I went home with my AVA intact, and I called it a good day of soaring by all accounts

In the last round of the contest, Skye's encountered a "pooper-birdhawk" (that is the name he all came up with anyways) as the bird was chasing and seemingly attacking his sailplane during his flight. Upon landing, bird residue (Al said the purple was from the bird eating mulberries which are in season) was discovered on the horizontal tail (see picture below).

Ron Mong yesterday's winner ended up second on Sunday and was the combined 2-Day Grand Champion.

So, DARTS June 12 ALES is in the books with a good time had by all!

The narrative of this page, the Results Summary table below and the detailed output from the ESL scoring program are for Sunday's
DARTS June 12 ALES contest.
There is one set of pictures for both contests, they are shown on both Contest Reports.

Saturday's Contest Report for the
MOSS ALES #3 contest
can be found
HERE

Joe M

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2016 DARTS June 12 ALES Results Summary - (Sunday)

place

pilot

score

percentage

1

Shape, Jerry

6257.45

100.00

2

Mong, Ron

5764.39

92.12

3

Malcolm, Skye

5371.76

85.85

4

Trussell, Gavin

5148.74

82.28

5

Harris, Don

5099.08

81.49

6

Stahl, Gordy

5031.40

80.41

7

Perez, Gilbert

5018.82

80.21

8

Youngen, Ted

4756.25

76.01

9

Mekina, Joe

4727.98

75.56

10

Groves, Mark

4574.18

73.10

11

Andersen, Barry

4538.88

72.54

12

Filkins, J D

3464.81

55.37

13

Hoelcher, Bill

2980.81

47.64

14

Wrinkle, David

1036.60

16.57

15

Stevenson, Dan

586.92

9.38

16

Watkins, Jay

504.30

8.06

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Here are the direct outputs with more details from the computerized ESL scoring program.

These are some of the pics taken at both the Saturday MOSS and Sunday DARTS contests. Only one group picture was taken on Saturday, however I tried to caputure pics on Sunday for those few who were not flying on Saturday.

These are screen viewable thumbnails, to view the high resolution picture, click on a thumbnail, then use your browsers back button to return to this page.